Jamie Thomson : random waffle, twitterhttp://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/archive/tags/random+waffle/twitter/default.aspxTags: random waffle, twitterenCommunityServer 2.1 SP2 (Build: 61129.1)Whatever happened to Twitter Annotations?http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/archive/2012/01/25/whatever-happened-to-twitter-annotations.aspxWed, 25 Jan 2012 09:46:00 GMT21093a07-8b3d-42db-8cbf-3350fcbf5496:41296jamiet4http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/comments/41296.aspxhttp://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/commentrss.aspx?PostID=41296http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/rsscomments.aspx?PostID=41296<p>In April 2010 Twitter announced a new feature that they would soon be introducing - Twitter Annotations. Put simply Twitter Annotations can be described as the ability to attach metadata to a tweet; think hashtags on steroids. Lots of people were quite excited about it:</p><blockquote><p><i>I love to sit on the beach. &nbsp;One of the coolest things about the
beach is the number of layers of visual depth. &nbsp;Look at the sand and
it's beautiful, but zoom your eyes in closer and you'll see a whole
layer of life running around on the sand that you didn't see before.
&nbsp;Look even closer and you can see individual grains of sand, water and
light dancing between them. &nbsp;Look closer still and you see that each
grain of sand is a unique object with its own texture. &nbsp;If your eyes are
strong enough, or you have a machine to help you, you can see even more
layers by looking closer still.
That's what Twitter is going to be like with the launch of Twitter
Annotations this Summer. It's a beautiful vision, with huge potential<a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/what_twitter_annotations_mean.php" target="_blank"></a></i></p><p><i><a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/what_twitter_annotations_mean.php" target="_blank">What Twitter Annotations mean by Marshall Kirkpatrick</a></i></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><i>Today at the Twitter Chirp Hack Day I talked with a ton of developers and
the new feature they were most interested in. Adam Jackson echoed
everyone I’ve heard today when <a href="http://twitter.com/adamjackson/statuses/12180272857">he tweeted </a>“Twitter Annotations is what I’ve been wanting FOREVER.”<a href="http://scobleizer.com/2010/04/15/twitter-annotations/" target="_blank"></a></i></p><p><i><a href="http://scobleizer.com/2010/04/15/twitter-annotations/" target="_blank">Developers: how will we all get along with Twitter’s annotation feature? by Robert Scoble</a><br></i></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><i>Twitter announced a series of new features <a href="http://gigaom.com/2010/04/14/twitter-launches-places-annotations-user-streams-for-developers/">at its Chirp conference in April,</a>
...the one that has the most potential to change the way the
social network functions in fundamental ways is Annotations, which
Twitter said would be rolled out in the second quarter of the year ... Annotations would allow developers (and Twitter itself, of course) to
add additional information to a tweet — such as a string of text, a URL,
a location tag or bits of data — without affecting its character count.
In other words, such information would be metadata about the tweet or
the user who posted it, and would be carried along as an additional
payload as it traveled through the Twitter network. Apps and services
could then collect that information and filter it or make sense of it.
In some ways, Annotations are like Facebook’s <a href="http://opengraphprotocol.org/">open graph protocol</a>, which also adds metadata to the behavior of users on certain sites when they’re logged in<a href="http://gigaom.com/2010/06/20/twitter-annotations-are-coming-what-do-they-mean-for-twitter-and-the-web/" target="_blank"></a></i></p><p><i><a href="http://gigaom.com/2010/06/20/twitter-annotations-are-coming-what-do-they-mean-for-twitter-and-the-web/" target="_blank">Twitter Annotations Are Coming — What Do They Mean For Twitter and the&nbsp;Web? by Matthew Ingram</a><br></i></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><i>What &lt;others&gt; did not mention is what I think is
potentially the most fascinating use of opening up annotations. Google’s
success today is built on their <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank" target="_blank">page rank</a>
algorithm that measures the validity of a web page by the number of
incoming links to it and the page rank of the sites containing those
links – its a system built on reputation. Twitter annotations could open
up a new paradigm however – let’s call it </i><i>People rank- where
reputation can be measured by the metadata that people choose to apply
to links and the websites containing those links. Its not hard to see
why Google and Microsoft have paid big bucks to get access to the
Twitter firehose!<a href="http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/archive/2010/04/21/interesting-things-twitter-annotations-and-your-phone-as-a-web-server.aspx" target="_blank"></a></i></p><p><i><a href="http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/archive/2010/04/21/interesting-things-twitter-annotations-and-your-phone-as-a-web-server.aspx" target="_blank">Interesting things – Twitter annotations and your phone as a web server by Jamie Thomson (i.e. me!)</a></i>
</p></blockquote><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Twitter themselves said in May 2010:</p><blockquote><p><i>We will continue to move as quickly as we can to deliver the Annotations
capability to the market so that developers everywhere can create
innovative new business solutions on the growing Twitter platform.<a href="http://blog.twitter.com/2010/05/twitter-platform.html" target="_blank"></a></i></p><p><i><a href="http://blog.twitter.com/2010/05/twitter-platform.html" target="_blank">The Twitter Platform</a></i></p></blockquote><p>&nbsp;</p><p>That was 20 months ago. The question I now ask is....<b>where are they</b>? Evidently I'm not the only one asking that question because in a thread entitled <a href="https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/3769" target="_blank">How can I try the Annotations API?</a> in November 2011 <a href="http://twitter.com/gcsfred" target="_blank">Gustavo Frederico</a> asked:</p><blockquote><p><i>How can I try the Annotations API? I'm looking forward to trying it out.</i></p></blockquote><p>&nbsp;To which <a href="http://twitter.com/episod" target="_blank">Taylor Singletary</a> (a Twitter employee) replied:</p><blockquote><p><i>Annotations is still more concept then reality. Maybe some day we'll have more to say about them.</i><br></p></blockquote><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Hmmm...in 18 months the situation has have gone from "<b>We will continue to move as quickly as we can to deliver the Annotations
capability to the market</b>" &amp; "<b>rolled out in the second quarter of the year</b>" to "<b>Annotations is still more concept then reality</b>", that's quite a climb-down if you ask me. I have strong hopes that Twitter Annotations will be with us eventually but the deafening silence isn't particularly encouraging.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>You might ask why I am bothered, I am only a SQL Server developer after all. That is true but I still consider that my job can loosely be defined as <b>extracting value from data </b>and from that perspective the onslaught of data (nay, <i>structured</i> data) that Twitter Annotations would bring should be of interest to both myself and my clients.</p><p>I am also fascinated as to how Twitter Annotations could work with <a href="http://schema.org/" target="_blank">Schema.org</a> which is heavily backed by Google and Microsoft and which Microsoft are pushing as the backbone of Contracts in Windows 8 (Schema.org is mentioned in <a href="http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/APP-405T" target="_blank">this video</a> from the Build conference).<br></p><p>So, I ask again, whatever happened to Twitter Annotations? Does anyone know?</p><p><a href="http://twitter.com/jamiet" target="_blank">@jamiet</a> </p><p>Update: Apparently I'm not the only person thinking this: <a href="http://www.blackrimglasses.com/2012/06/20/twitter-please-reconsider-the-platform-vs-product-decision/">http://www.blackrimglasses.com/2012/06/20/twitter-please-reconsider-the-platform-vs-product-decision/</a> <br></p><img src="http://sqlblog.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=41296" width="1" height="1">random waffletwitterInteresting things – Twitter annotations and your phone as a web serverhttp://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/archive/2010/04/21/interesting-things-twitter-annotations-and-your-phone-as-a-web-server.aspxWed, 21 Apr 2010 21:41:04 GMT21093a07-8b3d-42db-8cbf-3350fcbf5496:24465jamiet10http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/comments/24465.aspxhttp://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/commentrss.aspx?PostID=24465http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/rsscomments.aspx?PostID=24465<p>I overheard/read a couple of things today that really made me, data junkie that I am, take a step back and think, “Hmmm, yeah, that could be really interesting” and I wanted to make a note of them here so that (a) I could bring them to the attention of anyone that happens to read this and (b) I can maybe come back here in a few years and see if either of these have come to fruition.</p> <hr /> <h5>Your phone as a web server</h5> <p>While listening to <a href="http://jonudell.net/" target="_blank">Jon Udell</a>’s (<a href="http://twitter.com/judell" target="_blank">twitter</a>) “Interviews with Innovators Podcast” today in which he <a href="http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4456.html#" target="_blank">interviewed</a> <a href="http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/home/" target="_blank">Herbert Van de Sompel</a> (<a href="http://twitter.com/hvdsomp" target="_blank">twitter</a>) about his Momento project. During the interview Jon and Herbert made the following remarks:</p> <blockquote> <p><em>Jon: [some people] really had this vision of a web of servers, the notion that every node on the internet, every connected entity, is potentially a server and a client…we can see where we’re getting to a point where these endpoint devices we have in our pockets are going to be massively capable and it may be in the not too distant future that significant chunks of the web archive will be cached all over the place including on your own machine…</em></p> <p><em>Herbert: wasn’t it Opera who at one point turned your browser into a server?</em></p> </blockquote> <p>That really got my brain ticking. We all carry a mobile phone with us and therefore we all potentially carry a mobile web server with us as well and to my mind the only thing really stopping that from happening is the capabilities of the phone hardware, the capabilities of the network infrastructure and the will to just bloody do it. Certainly all the standards required for addressing a web server on a phone already exist (to this uninitiated observer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System" target="_blank">DNS</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipv6" target="_blank">IPv6</a> seem to solve that problem) so why not?</p> <p>I <a href="http://twitter.com/jamiet/statuses/12587565057" target="_blank">tweeted about the idea</a> and <a href="http://twitter.com/rorytweet" target="_blank">Rory Street</a> <a href="http://twitter.com/RoryTweet/status/12589074361" target="_blank">answered back</a> with “<a href="http://twitter.com/RoryTweet/status/12589074361" target="_blank">why would you want a phone to be a web server?</a>”:</p> <blockquote> <p><a href="http://twitter.com/RoryTweet/status/12589074361"><img style="border-right-width:0px;display:inline;border-top-width:0px;border-bottom-width:0px;border-left-width:0px;" title="rory street tweet" border="0" alt="rory street tweet" src="http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/image_32163779.png" width="406" height="207" /></a> </p> </blockquote> <p>Its a fair question and one that I would like to try and answer. Mobile phones are increasingly becoming our window onto the world as we use them to upload messages to Twitter, record our location on FourSquare or interact with our friends on Facebook but in each of these cases some other service is acting as our intermediary; to see what I’m thinking you have to go via Twitter, to see where I am you have to go to FourSquare (I’m using ‘I’ liberally, I don’t <em>actually use</em> FourSquare before you ask).</p> <p>Why should this have to be the case? Why can’t that data be decentralised? Why can’t we be masters of our own data universe? If my phone acted as a web server then I could expose all of that information without needing those intermediary services. I see a time when we can pass around URLs such as the following:</p> <ul> <li>http://jamiesphone.net/location/current - Where is Jamie right now? </li> <li>http://jamiesphone.net/location/2010-04-21 – Where was Jamie on 21st April 2010? </li> <li>http://jamiesphone.net/thoughts/current – What’s on Jamie’s mind right now? </li> <li>http://jamiesphone.net/blog – What documents is Jamie sharing with me? </li> <li>http://jamiesphone.net/calendar/next7days – Where is Jamie planning to be over the next 7 days? </li> </ul> <p>and those URLs get served off of the phone in our pockets.</p> <p>If we govern that data then we can control who has access to it and (crucially) how long its available for. Want to wipe yourself off the face of the web? its pretty easy if you’re in control of all the data – just turn your phone off.</p> <p>None of this exists today but I look forward to a time when it does. Opera really were onto something last June when <a href="http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2009/06/16/" target="_blank">they announced Opera Unite</a> (admittedly Unite only works because Opera provide an intermediary DNS-alike system – it isn’t totally decentralised).</p> <hr /> <h5>Opening up Twitter annotations</h5> <p>Last week Twitter held their first developer conference called Chirp where they announced an upcoming new feature called ‘Twitter Annotations’; in short this will allow us to attach metadata to a Tweet thus enhancing the tweet itself. Think of it as a richer version of hashtags. To think of it another way Twitter are turning their data into a humongous <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-attribute-value_model" target="_blank">Entity-Attribute-Value</a> or triple-tuple store. </p> <p>That alone has huge implications both for the web and Twitter as a whole – the ability to enrich that 140 characters data and thus make it more useful is indeed compelling however today I stumbled upon a blog post from <a href="http://twitter.com/eugmandel" target="_blank">Eugene Mandel</a> entitled <a href="http://blog.mustexist.com/2010/04/14/tweet-annotations-a-way-to-a-metadata-marketplace/" target="_blank">Tweet Annotations – a Way to a Metadata Marketplace?</a> where he proposed the idea of allowing tweets to have metadata added by people <em>other than the person who tweeted the original tweet</em>. This idea really fascinated me especially when I read some of the potential uses that Eugene and his commenters suggested. They included:</p> <ul> <li>Amazon could attach an ISBN to a tweet that mentions a book. Specialist clients apps for book lovers could be built up around this metadata. </li> <li>Advertisers could pay to place adverts in metadata. The revenue generated from those adverts could be shared with the tweeter or people who add the metadata. </li> </ul> <p>Granted, allowing anyone to add metadata to a tweet has the potential to create a spam problem the like of which we haven’t even envisaged but spam hasn’t halted the growth of the web and neither should it halt the growth of data annotations either. The original tweeter should of course be able to determine who can add metadata and whether it should be moderated. As Eugene says himself:</p> <blockquote> <p><em>Opening publishing tweet annotations to anyone will open the way to a marketplace of metadata where client developers, data mining companies and advertisers can add new meaning to Twitter and build innovative businesses.</em></p> </blockquote> <p>What Eugene and his followers did not mention is what I think is potentially the most fascinating use of opening up annotations. Google’s success today is built on their <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank" target="_blank">page rank</a> algorithm that measures the validity of a web page by the number of incoming links to it and the page rank of the sites containing those links – its a system built on reputation. Twitter annotations could open up a new paradigm however – let’s call it <em>People rank</em>- where reputation can be measured by the metadata that people choose to apply to links and the websites containing those links. Its not hard to see why Google and Microsoft have paid big bucks to get access to the Twitter firehose!</p> <hr /> <p>Neither of these features, phones as a web server or the ability to add annotations to other people’s tweets, exist today but I strongly believe that they could dramatically enhance the web as we know it today. I hope to look back on this blog post in a few years in the knowledge that these ideas have been put into place.</p> <p><a href="http://twitter.com/jamiet" target="_blank">@Jamiet</a></p><img src="http://sqlblog.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=24465" width="1" height="1">entity-attribute-valuerandom waffletwitterTwitter status id conundrumhttp://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/archive/2010/04/18/twitter-status-id-conundrum.aspxSun, 18 Apr 2010 15:05:38 GMT21093a07-8b3d-42db-8cbf-3350fcbf5496:24385jamiet5http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/comments/24385.aspxhttp://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/commentrss.aspx?PostID=24385http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/rsscomments.aspx?PostID=24385<p>I have an interest, a slightly perverse one some might say, in using online services and trying to figure out what the underlying (logical) data model is and in this day and age Twitter is one that lends itself very well to scrutiny. Consider this recent tweet of mine:</p> <blockquote> <p><a title="odata rdf tweet" href="http://twitter.com/jamiet/status/12154647354" target="_blank"><img style="border-bottom:0px;border-left:0px;display:inline;border-top:0px;border-right:0px;" title="odata rdf tweet screenshot" border="0" alt="odata rdf tweet screenshot" src="http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/image_0DAD61B4.png" width="389" height="246" /></a> </p> </blockquote> <p>The URL that enables you to see that tweet is <a href="http://twitter.com/jamiet/status/12154647354" target="_blank">http://twitter.com/jamiet/status/12154647354</a><strong></strong>. We can interpret that URL to mean &quot;a tweet by jamiet with an id of 12154647354&quot; and hence we might further assume that the unique identifier for the tweet is {jamiet,12154647354}. <br /></p> <p>However, its well-known that Twitter gives each status a unique ID regardless of who tweeted it so we might expect we could reach that tweet just by using a URL of <a href="http://twitter.com/status/12154647354" target="_blank">http://twitter.com/status/12154647354</a> however (at the time of writing) that only redirects to Twitter's homepage. That seems strange to me especially given that we can use Twitter's API to access information about that tweet using only the id of the status. Witness <a href="http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/show/12154647354.xml" target="_blank">http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/show/12154647354.xml</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p><a title="twitter api screenshot xml" href="http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/show/12154647354.xml" target="_blank"><img style="border-bottom:0px;border-left:0px;display:inline;border-top:0px;border-right:0px;" title="screenshot of twitter api result" border="0" alt="screenshot of twitter api result" src="http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/image_0C8852C8.png" width="477" height="400" /></a> </p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p><em>[We can also access a </em><a href="http://json.org/" target="_blank">JSON</a><em></em><em> version of that information using </em><a href="http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/show/12154647354.json" target="_blank">http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/show/12154647354.json</a><em></em><em>]</em></p> </blockquote> <p>I'm puzzled as to why a tweet can't be accessed using on the main twitter website using the id alone. Anyone have any suggestions?</p> <p><a href="http://twitter.com/jamiet" target="_blank">@jamiet</a></p><img src="http://sqlblog.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=24385" width="1" height="1">data modellingrandom waffletwitter